1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a software building support system for supporting the building of a software program. More specifically, the invention relates to a software building support system, method and program for building a software program by connecting a plurality of software components, and a composite component comprising a combination of a plurality of software components.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, as a software building support system of this type, there is known a CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool for defining the structure of a software program via a graphical user interface.
In such a CASE tool, each of a plurality of processes (software components) in a software program to be built can be usually represented by a single icon so that the icons can be connected by lines to define the structure of the software program (the flow of processing between a plurality of software components).
As described above, in the conventional CASE tool, it is possible to define the structure of the software program by a graphical representation, which is the line-connection relationship between icons. Therefore, it is possible to carry out the operation for building the software program in a form, which is easily recognized by humans, and it is possible to relatively easily manage the software program thus build.
However, in the above-described conventional CASE tool, if the scale of the software program to be built increases to complicate the structure, the graphical representation is necessarily complicated, so that there is a problem in that it is accelerated to be difficult to grasp the structure of the whole software program. In addition, if it is difficult to grasp the structure of the software program, there is a problem in that it is also difficult to manage and reuse the software program thus built in accordance therewith.